An introduction to Jordan Scott

What follows is an introduction to Jordan Scott’s reading/screening at the University of Georgia on Wednesday, September 24, 2014. Sponsored by the creative writing program, the event was held at 7 p.m. in the Lab Room at Ciné, 234 West Hancock Avenue, in Athens, Georgia. Earlier that afternoon, Scott had visited Andrew Zawacki’s advanced undergraduate workshop “Graph & Photograph,” whose twenty-one students interviewed Scott about Decomp.

LISTEN TO THE SHOWI meet Andrew Zawacki in this episode of Into the Field, recorded on the campus of the University of Georgia in Athens. Zawacki teaches in the creative writing program at UGA, and holds degrees from the College of William and Mary, Oxford, the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, and the University of Chicago. His books of poetry are By Reason of Breakings (University of Georgia Press, 2002), Anabranch (Wesleyan University Press, 2004), and Petals of Zero Petals of One (Talisman House, 2009). Zawacki's writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Nation, and The New Republic, as well as in many anthologies and journals. We talk about his ambivalence toward his role as a "professional" poet, and discuss what he's learned from his students over the years. The show begins with a reading from his long poem "Georgia," which explores his sense of cultural alienation after moving to Athens in 2005.

On Barrett Watten's questions

It is no accident that the title of Barrett Watten’s second twenty-first-century critical book analyzing Language writing as an ongoing “presence” within the avant-garde continuum and literary history echoes Roman Jakobson’s 1977 collection of essays, Questions de poetique[1] Just as Jakobson’s essays interrogate the precarious position of poetry in an age saturated with analog media (e.g., how poetry is and is not different from the newspaper, the radio, television, etc.), so too Watten’s essays address the position of poetry in relationship to other modes of inn